Tag Archives: Wayward Sisters

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Recap of events up to this point. Still no rock and the incidental music is frequently dull this season.

Cut to Now and Dean walking back into the Bunker with Sam. Dean is already back in shirtsleeves and talking about how he doesn’t remember anything from saying yes in the Bunker to waking up in front of TFW:TEP at the end of last week. This is almost certainly a lie, since Dean was fully awake and fighting when he went up against Lucifer in the season finale.

Dean is a little shocked to see the Bunker’s HQ turned into an actual HQ (and where the hell were all these people last week, when Castiel was pulling double duty, babysitting Jack and Nick?), and even more so that people are already calling Sam “Chief” after just a few weeks. Yeah, I know. Convenient writing. Just roll with it.

Dean is reunited with Jack and Castiel, who seem glad to see him again, especially Castiel. Then Dean makes the excuse that he needs to go shower and leaves. As the others ask Sam if Dean is all right (think that’s a big old NO, Ghost Rider), and Sam hedges, we see Dean enter his room, take off his outer shirt, and spot a ginormous scar on his right shoulder in the mirror.

Cue title cards.

So, Dean hides this and pretends nothing’s wrong – wait, that’s only half-right. He actually goes to tell Sam and Castiel. No secrets. Who are you and what have you done with Dean Winchester?!

Dean insists that Castiel do a mind-meld (i.e., soul read, which, as we know from season six’s “The Third Man,” is extremely painful) to dig up his memories. Castiel finds some fragments of already-filmed stuff of Michael and his experiments, and seems puzzled why a powerful archangel would be creating monsters (you and me both, dude). He then discovers a new memory – one of DeanMichael getting stabbed in the shoulder, creating the odd scar. There’s a lot of screaming, but no blood (of course) and also no angel light (whoops, continuity error or just plain being cheap about the FX).

Dean has no idea what Castiel just dug up, so they call Jody. Not sure why, but it’s what they do.

Jody is getting a text from Claire (I think) about Alex’s laundry. Claire asks if Jody is on a hunt and Jody says no. Then she gets a call from TFW 1.0.

So, the reason they called her is that Dean recognized the figure that stabbed him/Michael as the same hooded figure that casually murdered Kaia in the “Bad Place” last season. We know (though they don’t) that this was Bad Place!Kaia, so I want to reiterate that she murdered her own counterpart in this world, without an ounce of apparent remorse. I’m thinking that will be important later.

Anyhoo, it turns out the hunt Jody wasn’t telling Claire about involves headless bodies with the same scar.

Dean immediately packs. He, Sam and Castiel are heading out when Jack comes in and wants to help. Sam and Castiel hedge, but Dean’s the one who gets blamed for “hurting” Jack’s feelings by saying he’s not strong enough to go. Yeah, because that’s much worse than taking him along and letting him get beaten to a pulp by demons – oh, wait.

Roadblock number 2 is a female Hunter coming in (apparently Yet Another alt-SPNverse Denizen) with the only survivor of a witch. The witch is dead, but she apparently hexed the girl with an ageing spell. Castiel can’t immediately cure her, so he stays behind to work on it. Dean forges ahead with just Sam.

Oh, by the way, it was established earlier in the ep that Nick is still in the wind and TFW:TEP has no idea he’s turned into a murderer.

In the car, Dean is speeding a bit (75 doesn’t really seem very fast, but okay) and Sam decides it’s time to get pissy and have The Talk about how Dean’s not acknowledging his feelings. Because this has gone so well before, mainly due to Sam always using what info he worms out of Dean to hurt Dean later. Just sayin’, Sam.

Sam whines that time may not have passed for Dean, but it passed for him and he’s worried and he wants Dean to tell him stuff Dean claims he doesn’t remember. Dean is charitable enough not to throw in Sam’s face the times Sam took off on him and did things and told Dean they were none of his business (not to mention that whole “year off” when Dean was in Purgatory and Sam didn’t look for him).

BTW, Dean thinks Sam needs to lose the beard. I’m kinda with him on that.

They arrive at Jody’s, in a meeting at night in the woods. Jody and Dean enthusiastically hug, and Jody admits she’s been hiding the hunt from Claire. Alex is still working at the hospital. Patience is still in school. Jody likes the beard. Dean rolls his eyes at Sam behind her back. Then Dean suggests they go right off into the hunt, even as Sam suggests they wait until daylight. Uh, Sam, honey, Jody just met you at night in the woods and said she doesn’t want to go home until the hunt is done. Go hunt.

There are three bodies so far. Jody thought they were human, but if they’re headless, you can’t really check to see if they’re vampires. Since, like, now vampires can bleed, and all. LOL!canon. And they might be werewolves

Back at the Bunker, Jack decides to pack a bag and leaves note to “Sam,Dean,Castiel.” But as he’s about to go do the Little Orphan Annie shtick, he hears voices down the hall. It’s Castiel and the Hunter, trying to cure the Damsel in Distress in the infirmary. When Jack comes in, Castiel explains that he can’t heal the girl because “the spell is too knotted.” Whatever that means. Castiel got hold of Rowena, who told him to try a reversal spell, but it’s complicated.

Castiel notices the backpack and asks if Jack is leaving. Jack, with a new look of determination, says no and enters the infirmary, presumably to help the girl.

Is the Hunter this week being played by the actress who played the detective in the Warner Bros cartoon ep? She was fun.

It’s daylight in the woods and Dean wants to split up. Sam and Jody veto the idea, so Dean just strides ahead and they run to catch up. Dean finds a campfire (still smoking) with three heads – three vampire heads – on poles in front of it.

Jody and Sam debate over whether it’s just a really big coincidence, or whether these are her three John Does as Dean confirms that they are vampires. But Jody is confused by this. She says that she took their blood home and had Alex examine it. The blood didn’t react to silver or anything like that. Well, vamps wouldn’t.

Dean crouches by the fire and checks out how long it’s been since it was last tended. Then he looks up over his shoulder and is startled by a vivid and hallucinatory flashback of the hooded figure that stabbed him, with the spear in its hands. When he looks up again, though, the figure is actually there and poised to strike. It’s not a flashback. It’s a flashforward, a premonition sort of like Patience’s gift, except briefer and more shadowy. I’m reminded of Zachariah’s claim in “Point of No Return” that Michael foresaw the day Dean would say yes in great detail (except that Dean didn’t quite say yes that day). So, Dean may have a new power. Kewl.

And before anybody starts going on about Dean is fully human, folks, that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, sunk, been rediscovered and brought up by deep sea submersibles, and set up in a museum. And besides, Nick sure as hell isn’t just an ordinary guy, anymore, either, and it took Sam a hell of a long time to become fully human again – about ten seasons, to be exact. So, no, Dean is not fully human anymore, if he ever truly was.

Anyhoo, the whateveritis gives a startled Dean just enough warning to dodge a strike from the spear. A fight ensues in which the refugee from Arrow gets all Kung-Fu genre on the three of them. Though Dean probably would have won if the hood hadn’t come off and the person he saw looked just like Kaia. EVOL!Kaia (sadly, the actress still only has about three expressions) knocks Dean over, tosses her spear to a mound nearby, swan-leaps over a fence, grabs it, and runs away. All of this is entirely unnecessary for a real fight and looks fake. I hate the way EVOL!Kaia fights.

Back at the Bunker, Jack sits with the young girl, who tells him her life story. As subtext anvils rain down, she asks of Castiel is his dad. Jack says, “One of them,” smiling fondly. When he asks her if there’s anyone they can call, she says her mother, but she fears Mom would hate her. She ran away from home out of rebellion (Jack looks guilty) and was taken in, along with two other girls, by the witch. She says the witch gave them gifts (Jack notices a big, honking necklace that Castiel and the Hunter apparently didn’t), but then the witch turned mean. She locked them up and the other girls withered away to husks. Now, she is withering away, too, but even faster, and she’s scared. Jack reassures her that Castiel will find a solution.

In the woods, Dean is still striding ahead and Sam still wants to chew the fat. This is basically just an excuse by the writers for some infodumping from Sam about how he thinks Michael sent his super-vampires (I guess he somehow found a way to perfect them?) to kill EVOL!Kaia for reasons as-yet unknown. Dean’s like, yeah, all right, but that doesn’t change the plan. Which is, obviously, to find and capture EVOL!Kaia. As Dean walks off, Jody pats Sam on the shoulder and follows Dean. Yay, Jody.

Thanks to Dean’s tracking skills (which are still excellent), they can follow EVOL!Kaia. And they do, as the day passes again toward night.

In the Bunker, Castiel and the Hunter do a Latin spell together, but it only speeds up the ageing process and DiD starts to choke as Jack looks on, distressed. I check my watch.

By the way, it was also infodumped at the beginning that Mary and Bobby stayed back at Michael’s laboratory to … uh … clean up his experiments.

Back in the woods, Jody skips a call from Claire. She tells Sam she promised Claire that she would cover all human-related cases but would let Claire know about “anything monster-y.” This, however, would be too much. It seems that Kaia was Claire’s “first love” (well, yeah, it would be rather awkward to continue much further with Claire’s weird puppy-dog hero worship thing for Dean, since he’s twice her age and totally not into it, or ever address again that whole Daddy Issues stuff she had going with her Fagin dude that Dean killed). So, Jody is not going to tell Claire. Or, at least, she’s going to put it off as long as she can.

Jody asks Sam about how he and Dean are doing (more infodumping about feels!). Sam says that Dean is “working something out – alone” (hey, man, you asked Dean to address what Michael did to him and he said he was by going on this hunt). Sam doesn’t think Dean is any more ready for this hunt than Claire would be. Jody points out that maybe Dean needs to be on this hunt. After all, hunts are how Dean works out dark and destructive feelings. Dean’s entirely barren field of fucks in “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” fairly leaps to mind here.

Boy, the woods are really nice and clean and open here in Vanco – I mean, Sioux Falls (and it was amusing to see Sam geek out once again about serial killers, to Jody’s consternation and Dean’s exasperation).

So, cut from Sam’s manly, brooding, bearded face to EVOL!Kaia dropping down into a crouch next to some cabin. She enters, briefly scans the interior, then goes to the sink for some water. After stealing some crackers, she comes back out. The creaking of wood warns her, but this turns out to be deliberate. She turns right into a gun butt from Dean, who was waiting on the porch. As she falls, Sam and Jody happen to be standing there (even though they weren’t when she walked out onto the porch. Continuity error, there).

Gotta say, that was pretty satisfying. I rewatched it a time or two. She’s a tad high on the Jerk Sue scale.

So, they tie her to a chair and interrogate her. After they confirm that she is the Kaia from the Bad Place, they ask her why she came through the rift. She refuses to say why, so Sam asks her why she’s (still) in Sioux Falls. She says it’s “because of him.” She means Michael and Dean confirms he’s no longer Michael. She snarks, “I know. You’re much weaker.” Because really, she wasn’t already obnoxious enough. Gotta say that seeing any version of Kaia ever again on this show was not high up on my wish list and this episode is not changing that opinion.

Anyhoo, Dean says, yeah, whatever, but “you’re still scared.” She claims she’s not scared of Dean (but she sure should be). She’s afraid of “them.” She means the monsters Michael has been sending after her. Every time she stops running, more come. As she speaks, we get a view of her camp, with three new super-vamps surveying the severed heads of their predecessors and snarling.

EVOL!Kaia claims she wasn’t trying to kill her double, with whom she claims to have had a Very Special Bond, but “the blonde” (Claire). Which is bullshit, of course, because if she’d actually cared about her double, and seen through her eyes, she would have known perfectly well not to try to kill Claire.

Jody says they need to get her back to the station for more security and protection. Dean says they have to “break her” right then and there. While Jody and Sam look a bit horrified, EVOL!Kaia smugly claims all Dean wants is the weapon she normally carries (but, for whatever reason, stashed someplace because Stuff to Keep the Plot Going). It does not seem to occur to her that these people who knew Kaia and “the blonde” might want to break her for less esoteric reasons – like revenge. For all her sparkly weapon and fancy martial arts, EVOL!Kaia is quite stupid.

By the way, back at the Bunker, DiD has died. As Castiel covers her face with a sheet, Jack weeps over her body, proclaiming that he could have saved her if he’d still had his own sparkly powers. Then he gets an idea (very belatedly). He pulls off the sheet, looks at the necklace, and asks the Hunter where she put the witch’s body. Um … excuse me? Didn’t the woman just salt and burn the witch on the spot? Nope, she brought her back to the morgue, where the witch is in the cooler. That was their first mistake. The second was not noticing the Big Honking Green Necklace On Her Neck that is identical to the one on DiD’s neck.

Some days, there just aren’t enough facepalms.

So, Jack explains in excruciating detail for Castiel, the Hunter and any of the slower members of the audience that the witch is still dead because the witch-killing bullet is still inside her. But the necklace drained DiD because it was trying to revive the witch, which it couldn’t do because the witch-killing bullet was still inside (really, it’s that spelled out). He yanks the necklace off her neck.

Back in the cabin, Dean is admitting that yes, he’s there for the weapon and is willing to torture EVOL!Kaia for it. He then tosses her around a bit, but EVOL!Kaia just smirks because sure, why would she be the least bit afraid of a guy who is wearing the face of the immensely powerful being that is sending monsters after her, 24/7? I’m not sure if the actress would be any better with more competent writing, but the script sure isn’t doing her any favors.

Meanwhile, Jody and Sam want to protect this puir widdle not-innocent who just bragged about killing her own double and trying to kill Claire. Pretty sure if Jody were actually in character in this scene, she’d be shoving Dean out of the way and cutting strips of skin off EVOL!Kaia.

Meanwhile, the vampires are coming. In case anybody still cares.

So, she claims that Dean is just like Michael, with his “threats” and “violence,” and she starts blathering on about how she “saw” Dean shove a gun in her double’s face (yet shows no fear because bad acting and awful writing make for a totally unrealistic character), and he’s afraid and “weak.” And this is the part where the script really crashes and burns for me.

Yeah, Dean forced Kaia to get into a car with him. And there’s been a lot of bashing of Dean (some fans really dig that) over the decision. Now, I’m okay with scenes where an antagonist calls Dean out on being so violent, but the ones that work (like, say, the interrogation scene in season one finale “Devil’s Trap”) involve much better writing and acting than this one.

The thing is that no other reaction from Dean in the scene where he threatens Kaia would have been in character. To Dean, Kaia was just shrugging off that she’d been helped out of a bad situation (the clinic) and refusing to help him, Sam and Jack rescue their mother, who was being tortured by Michael, right at that moment.

It wasn’t just that Kaia was afraid to help. It was that Kaia made it abundantly clear that she just didn’t give a shit. Too bad, so sad, getting on a bus now. If she hadn’t been afraid, she just wouldn’t have been bothered.

And just as an in-character Jody would have been ripping EVOL!Kaia apart rather than standing weakly by and mouthing platitudes about how torture is wrong (because Jody is a mama bear when it comes to Claire), an in-character Dean would have been bashed just as cheerfully by the same parts of fandom if he had not gone full-on Mad Max in 13.09 to save his mother, once he found out she was actually alive and – oh, yeah – being tortured by the archangel he was once supposed to say yes to, on anyone who got in his way.

But even this is rather beside the point because the very person who is calling Dean out on threatening Kaia is the one who murdered her. And excuse me, but murder (“accidental” for being the “wrong victim” or not) is far worse than a threat that isn’t actually carried out. So, screw you, EVOL!Kaia, you hypocritical little Psycho Sue, and get off my damned screen.

By the way, back at the Bunker, Jack brings the witch’s necklace back to the infirmary, smashes it, and DiD is instantly revived. So, there goes that B-plot.

In the cabin, more painful infodumping as we get a flashback to Michael appearing to EVOL!Kaia and offering her a place in his army if she gives him the spear. She attacks him (because, well, she’s stupid) and he easily evades her attacks (some nice stuntwork from Ackles, which unfortunately shows up the Kaia stuntwork in all its flaws) until she somehow manages to knock his feet out from under him and stab him in the shoulder. Not the heart, not the neck, not the eye, not anything that might have been, you know, effective. Just the shoulder.

Also, it’s pretty sad when the writers forget that full-power angels have wings and can easily outmaneuver a human using them, not to mention, smite them. Remember Anna against Mary in “The Song Remains the Same”? Like that. So, this fight is just straight-up lame.

Anyhoo, all is interrupted by the arrival (finally) of the super-vamps, who proceed to beat the crap out of Sam, Dean and Jody. A plot hole bubbles to the surface when one of the vamps insists he’s only there for EVOL!Kaia and they proceed to beat the crap out of Dean. Because I’m pretty sure that Michael’s vessel is still every bit as important as a spear that could kill him. If not more so.

The vamps are so dumb that when Dean frees Kaia by shooting her chair leg and she jumps out the window, they don’t follow her. So, it’s not a real shocker that she stabs one of them from behind, and then the other two conveniently turn around so she can whirl her big stick a few times and lop off their heads. She then pauses for a bit and Jody says hey, you came back instead of leaving us to die. EVOL!Kaia sullenly insists she came back to kill the monsters (because that totally makes sense – not) and then she bails.

Oh, please, Show, can’t you just kill her off offscreen? I’m begging you.

Afterward, Jody has a broken arm, but insists on driving herself home, after telling Dean not to blame himself (which is a bit like telling Dean not to breathe, but I appreciate her effort).

Back at the Bunker, Castiel visits Jack in his room and tells him he’s proud of him. The Hunter (who now has a name, Jules) is taking DiD back home to her mother. Can we keep Jules? She’s about the only decent thing about this trainwreck of an episode.

After Castiel leaves, Jack coughs up blood, but doesn’t tell anybody. Because it wouldn’t be a Supernatural episode without Secreth and Lieth.

In the car, Dean feels guilty for having said yes to Michael and says Sam was right (well … not really. About a lot of things). He just wanted to skip to the end where he got the weapon and killed the Big Bad. He says he never should have said yes (Sam, who would not be alive, and who knows full well what Lucifer was planning to do to the universe, had Dean not showed up at that church, says nothing to contradict him).

Dean then admits that he actually does remember all of being possessed. He doesn’t remember most of what Michael was doing, but he remembers the possession mostly as a kind of drowning and being too weak to overcome it. Which makes Sam’s whinging earlier in the ep about how he had to deal without Dean around, while Dean got to not remember the past few weeks, look pretty damned bad.

Credits.

This was a pretty inept script, full of endless, momentum-stopping, intelligence-insulting infodump, characters acting stupid or out of character simply to advance the plot, simplistic and linear plot turns (we still don’t even know why Michael left Dean, just how Dean got the scar), an unnecessary B plot, bad acting and some not-so-hot stuntwork, especially from the main guest star. Not what I would have liked to see from a Jody return or a Dean possession aftermath ep.

It’s probably therefore no big surprise the show got a fairly low rating of 0.4/2 in the demo and 1.39 million watching. in part due to audience bailing in the second half (though it seems that Legacies‘ unloved series premiere also dragged it down). Let’s hope next week has at least a tighter MOTW script because Show, you can do better than this.

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Contribute monthly via Patreon (which includes perks), make a one-time donation through Paypal, or buy us a coffee. I’m posting reviews here of North Carolina ghost story books, and notes about my research all month long in October on Patreon.

My collected recaps and reviews of season one, which first appeared on Innsmouth Free Press, are now up (with a few extras) on Kindle. The Kindle version is available through Amazon and is on sale through this Friday. The print version is also up. If you buy the print version, you get a Kindle copy thrown in for free. I also get paid if you get it on Kindle Unlimited (for free), read the Kindle version, or lend it to a friend via the Kindle Owners Lending Library. Reviews also help with sales. Just FYI.

Here are all my live recaps and reviews in one, handy-dandy spot, for Season 13.

We need your help!

My collected recaps and reviews of season one, which first appeared on Innsmouth Free Press, are now up (with a few extras) on Kindle and are currently on sale through this Friday (May 18). The Kindle version is available through Amazon. The print version is also up. If you buy the print version, you get a Kindle copy thrown in for free. I also get paid if you get it on Kindle Unlimited (for free), read the Kindle version, or lend it to a friend via the Kindle Owners Lending Library. Just FYI.

[lots o’ spoilers ahead]

I’ve been dawdling over this review for months, largely because, on top of working full-time as an English tutor and museum science educator, I just finished a semester full of an internship for finishing up my Historic Preservation Technology degree and College Algebra (for my sins). Well, I passed those classes and graduated on Friday – and the CW has passed on picking up Wayward Sisters after months of strongly implying the series was practically a go for launch. And the season 13 finale is on Thursday.

So, now seems like a good time to revisit this episode.

I usually try to start with something positive in reviews and get to the critical stuff later on. There are some episodes where it’s more difficult to find the positive than others (translation: almost all of the Nepotism Duo entries). However, with this one, I’m going to spin the format around and go with the critical stuff first, then the viability of the characters, then the viability of the spin-off this backdoor pilot was intended to introduce. I think this spin-off’s actually pretty doable, with some tweaks, but it’s going to take a bit to explain that, and why the potential spin-off is fairly unique. I’ve seen some concerns by posters (legit concerns), though, and I want to discuss them first. Not everyone would want to sit through the viability discussion on the spin-off to get to the review of the episode itself.

Also, I’ve been trying to go in order with the episode reviews, but since there’s a whole lot of talk about the spin-off right now, I’m going to talk about this one and then go back to catching up with the other episodes I haven’t reviewed yet, this season. Also, it means I can put off reviewing yet another dull and cluttered episode by the Nepotism Duo (“War of the Worlds” (13.07)) a little while longer.

So, here’s the Bad, the Mixed and the Good.

The Bad

Let’s talk about why some posters weren’t overly thrilled with the way the episode was set up. They were on to something. The basic premise is a hoary Western cliché that was old when Gunsmoke was on. It’s called “The men are incapacitated/out of town, and the wimminfolk have to step in and save the day.”

A signal example of why this isn’t exactly the most feminist trope ever popped up in 1978 in the original Battlestar Galactica‘s early episode, “Lost Planet of the Gods, Part I.” In it, most of the fleet’s (male) Viper pilots fall ill with a mystery virus, forcing a reluctant (and sexist) Apollo to rely on a bunch of new recruits. Most of them are young women and one of them is his new bride, Serena.

Lots of strident faux-feminist speechifying from the female characters and “down to earth,” condescending sarcasm from the male characters ensue. Naturally, as soon as the men are back on their feet, the women revert to being helpers and girlfriends, and fade into the background once more. In Serena’s case, she straight-up gets killed off in a Doomed Girlfriend in a Coma plot.

That’s the problem with the trope. It’s based on the idea that women are inherently weaker (and dumber) than men, and will only be called upon to engage in such heroic measures in an emergency when the men can’t protect them. As soon as the emergency is over, traditional gender roles snap right back into place and the women return to their kitchens. I’ll bet women who worked in the factories and trades during WWII, and lost their jobs to returning (male) GIs, cringed every time they saw this trope.

Now, obviously, the Wayward Sisters don’t quite revert to their previous roles at the end of the episode. In fact, part of what makes using this trope so awkward in this case is that it’s simply unnecessary for bringing these particular women into action. Jody, Donna, Alex and Claire are already actively Hunting. They’ve even specialized, Donna with Vampires and Claire (apparently) with Werewolves, aside from a smattering of other monsters (ghosts, not so much). Meanwhile, Alex has acquired a certain expertise in autopsying the supernatural.

This is all something of which the Brothers are well aware, having worked with Jody and Alex as recently as episode three of the season because they trust these women and their skills. Only the two new characters, Patience and Kaia (who have superpowers, but are otherwise total newbies to the Life) struggle to fit in. When Patience goes into battle with the other women, a gun is shoved into her hands and she gets offhand noises of approval when she finally manages to kill a monster.

So, why the condescending nonsense about the Little Women riding to the rescue and the dumbing down of the Brothers to accommodate the introduction of the women’s new team? Lousy, tone-deaf writing, that’s why.

Even the task the women have set themselves basically involves their staying at home in one place, waiting for the monsters to come to them, as opposed to the Brothers’ traveling around the country, putting out supernatural brushfires. Not so feminist and progressive, Show. Just sayin’.

This pops up repeatedly in the wheel-spinning the show has Sam and Dean do in the Bad Place. I saw a lot of spec that the mothershow would get canceled midway through season 14 to make way for the spin-off (pretty darned unlikely now). I think that would have been a very, very bad idea if the network wanted the mothershow’s core audience to accept the spin-off (and, at least a few months ago, it seemed apparent that they did).

Ever since the Dawn Ostroff era, saltgunners have been extremely sensitive to any hint that the CW is trying to kill off Supernatural (not least because Ostroff repeatedly did try to do that). Replacing it directly with a spin-off involving a different cast and premise would bring down that paranoia and wrath on the new show. It would kill the spin-off right at the start.

If they had taken this to series, unless Padalecki and Ackles had wanted out right away, I didn’t see the mothershow checking out before the end of season 15, in order to give the new show a good boost and remove any sense that the mothershow was being summarily replaced. Granted, that’s all moot now, unless the CW actually listens to the fan backlash over its failure to pick up the series. But this is a network where its ostensibly female-lead series are even more misogynistic than its male-lead series, while touting the mere fact it has any female-lead series in the first place as something great and progressive, so you probably shouldn’t hold your breath.

Do the showrunners and network understand this dynamic, especially after the ignominious crash-and-burn of previous would-be backdoor pilot, “Bloodlines” (which fans roundly hated for being terrible storytelling and barely even fitting into the SPNverse)? Well … some of the writing and direction this episode could have been a lot more reassuring on that level (and the network’s decision to pick up Yet Another Spin-off of The Vampire Diaries that is even less female-lead than the previous two shows kinda says it all for them).

If the Bad Place really was as deadly as Kaia kept saying it was (she claimed the Brothers wouldn’t last more than a few hours and they made it at least two days), there were better ways to show that than to write Sam and Dean as plot-stupid and suddenly unable to fight their way out of a wet paper bag with a hole in it and a pink neon sign in Kidprint font saying EXIT HERE. There simply was no way that EVOL!Kaia could have taken them both down, even though the plot was writing them as too stupid to pull out their angel swords (which EVOL!Kaia apparently never thought to take from them) until they reached the rift, let alone their guns. Guns trump a cute stick with a blade on it 99% of the time.

Sure, Meg managed it in season one. But she’s a demon and she enlisted help. Plus, that was season one.

Even the figure taking them by surprise was a dumb idea. That whole sequence failed to do what it was supposed to do – make EVOL!Kaia look badass – and just served to irritate the mothershow’s usual audience. I get that the Brothers couldn’t be the focus of the story in the sense of screentime, but their sojourn in the Bad Place could have been written a lot better. A few cute bits about Dean automatically going survivalist and Sam (unrealistically) being squeamish about eating a lizard didn’t cut it.

I mean, come on, writers. The Brothers spent most of season one looking for their father, but that was because he didn’t want to be found, not because he was too dumb to get out of his own mess.

Also not cutting it were a few random and vague references to the importance of the Brothers to the new team. Padalecki and Ackles could easily have had more time off, and the focus could still be on the women, without making the connection between them all so damned generic. This was a golden opportunity to show how much influence the Brothers have had on the next generation of Hunters, and deflect fan anger away from the new interlopers, by showing that the Sisters had an emotional connection with Sam and Dean.

Instead, the writers blew it with a few platitudes that made Claire’s motivation, especially, seem as shallow as a kiddie pool. They wouldn’t have even needed to invent a Woobie character for her to lose if they’d done a little more digging into why she would want to rush off to save Sam and Dean.

I wasn’t wowed, either, by the equally-lazy cliché of Jody and Donna (the adults) going off to investigate the boat and then having to be rescued by the teen girl pack. Well … more like Claire with a flamethrower while the others stood around looking awkward. The image definitely cut down on the danger vibe at the end of the scene.

Admittedly, part of that was another fail of the Bad Place set-up. Those creepy monsters that came through were not even remotely scary. They looked and were filmed like exactly what they were – athletic stunt guys doing parkour in creepy monster suits. The only time one looked cool and like an actual MOTW was when Alex was cutting up a dead one and removing its Mad-Max-style facemask.

Another problem with this was all the mucking about with Kaia and her character development (or sheer lack thereof). I’ll talk a bit in the section on characters about why making her and Claire a romantic couple was actually the most successful (or, at least, the least unsuccessful) aspect of their dynamic. For now, let’s focus on why that twist at the end was oh-so-not-good.

There was a common tactic in action and syndicated fantasy shows of the 80s and 90s to introduce a likeable character who appeared to be part of the main cast and then kill that character off right away, either in the pilot or the next episode or two. Basically, he or she was a disguised Red Shirt. The intent was to give the illusion that anyone could be killed off, even though everyone else usually proceeded to have adamantium plot armor until at least the end of the season.

With Kaia, they seem to have added on the cliché of replacing a likeable auxiliary character (especially one played by a PoC) with an EVOL version. Remember Sydney’s roommate in Alias? Like that. Sometimes, this works (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a doozy of a reveal involving Doctor Bashir, and I don’t mean the part about his being Khan-adjacent), but more often, it doesn’t, especially if the switch is permanent.

Part of the problem is that we just barely met Kaia and already, they’re rebooting her. Even if this person wearing Kaia’s face is really her with a personality change, as opposed to an EVOL alt-version of her or a monster taking on her appearance, she’s been rebooted. And it’s not as though we were especially attached to the person they just killed off, so there’s even less emotional investment in the reboot.

You have to care about an original in order to care about a reboot. This isn’t a situation like Fred and Illyria in Angel. We’ve barely met Kaia, so there’s little reason to care about her fate.

It just feels like a cheap way to introduce a really powerful character (at least, in terms of superpowers) very briefly to scatter characters into new configurations and then kill her off because she’s too superpowerful for weekly MOTW use. Plus, Dean would totally have wanted to go after his mom right now at the end of 13.10 if the Kaia of 13.09 were still alive.

So, the whole episode was locking down the new team and the premise, and not only was one character left swinging in the wind, but the writers intentionally did that. Rest assured that as this backdoor pilot isn’t going to series, we’re not likely ever to see a resolution to what happened here, any more than we had any resolution to the twist at the end of “Bloodlines” (not that anybody cared about that, but still). Look at how Jody and Donna and the rest of the crew just up and disappeared after the Donna-centric episode following this one.

Kaia’s been the focus of two episodes now and she still doesn’t feel like a real person. She feels more like a checklist of attributes, most of them making her a victim rather than a character. I feel as though the writers keep shoving her in my face (LOOK, LOOK, SHE’S A POOR INDIGENOUS STREET WAIF, FEEL SORRY FOR HER, HOW DARE YOU NOT FEEL SORRY FOR HER?), which gives me a headache and irritates me with the writers’ constant attempts to handwave their own sketchy writing. Don’t give me retro characterization and then try to guilt me into accepting it as groundbreaking writing in diversity.

While her bonding with Claire was a nice idea, it felt extremely rushed (especially with all the slashy overtones). I could see Claire feeling bad that she’d failed to save an innocent she’d sworn to protect (like the little girl at the beginning), but flinging herself into Jody’s arms and weeping as though she’d lost the love of her life after Kaia’s death? That I don’t get.

I could see her grieving over Dean like that, or Castiel (who gets zero concern from Claire or anyone else this episode, despite also being in the wind at this point as far as they know). It’s certainly how she grieved over her mother. And in the episode where she gets turned into a werewolf, we see Dean leave the room when he believes she is dying because he can’t watch. So, there is a bond between those two. But Kaia? Claire knew her for all of five minutes. Where is all of this emotion coming from?

And why does Kaia suddenly decide to trust her after flatly refusing to help Jack or the Brothers? That seems vaguely misandrist. It’s the same lesbian-knight-saves-superpowered-damsel-in-distress conflict as the one involving Charlie and the fairy in “LARP and the Real Girl,” except that this time, the fairy dies and is a WoC (Woman of Color). The plot eventually resolves into a case where a WoC with sparkly powers gets fridged to motivate a white character who is being presented as the episode’s Hero. Hmmm, yeah, nope, not so progressive.

Also, Kaia wasn’t very sympathetic in either of her episodes. She was whiny and helpless and not even very good at escaping humans, let alone taking care of herself against supernatural creatures. She seemed to oscillate between fearful “Well, screw you all; I’m leaving you to clean up my multiverse mess” and “I shall face my fears by coming over to the other world and helping you, fair Claire.”

I never got any sense of responsibility for her own actions, let alone heroism, from Kaia. Granted, it was a stupid idea to let her actually go with Claire to the Bad Place, since she was the only one who could find it, but a little stepping-up-to-the-plate seemed in order for her being part of the team. She seemed very selfish and immature, except for the jarring shift to “By golly, I will help you” at the end of both this and the previous episodes.

It might have worked with an older and more experienced actress, but really, a lot of it was down to the poor writing and weird direction. I also sensed, from the terrible and choppy way the fight scene in the Bad Place was staged (a lot like the very frustrating cutting back and forth in the dark that you see in Arrow), that a natural at stage-fighting she’s not. It reminded me of all the dancing around Katie Cassidy’s lack of stage-fighting skills in season three.

The Mixed

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Kaia, I think Jody and Donna were the best-realized of the characters. Sure, they’ve had multiple episodes to develop and the characters are also played by older and more experienced actresses. But also, I think a lot of it came down to the fact that Jody and Donna have their own supernatural-rooted conflicts, based on their being cops in a rural area, and Jody’s loss of her husband and son to monsters. Plus, their training and experience as law enforcement officers have given them a jump-start on the skills they need to survive as Hunters.

They don’t suffer from constant comparisons to Sam and Dean because their central character conflicts aren’t directly pilfered from Sam and Dean. I’d definitely watch a show with just Jody and Donna (I especially liked their incidental theme music while they were boarding the boat). They make a great team and come across as salty old Hunters in the Winchester tradition, already. I’m rather less certain I’d watch a show with just the younger women.

Some people had issues with Donna due to her accent and boisterously pro-gun attitude, but Jody was the one who struck me as a bit of a weathervane character in “Wayward Sisters.” I don’t mind Donna’s accent. She’s an obvious homage to Marge Gunderson in Fargo, whom I love as a character. I love the series, too (plenty of broad accents in that).

You may ask why I hated the RP English accents of last season, but had no problem with Donna’s. Let’s just say that the RP accents of characters like Bela and Toni were genuinely fake, and represented some weird and ugly national stereotypes. But there are some people in the U.S. who actually talk like Donna and certainly some who act like her. And that regional stereotype really is more broad than negative.

More to the point, she’s not an antagonist, and is a solid and capable Hunter. Donna may have issues with her weight and with men (especially her jerkoff ex), but she is fully confident and competent Hunting Vampires.

Jody is fine this episode when she’s off with Donna, but she flip-flops a lot whenever she’s with Claire. She wants Claire to be safe. No, she wants to let Claire go save the world. Make up your mind, Jody.

In the process, she also ends up ignoring Alex, a girl she previously had gone to bat for with the Brothers to save her when Alex was forcibly turned into a Vampire and they were considering killing her. I get that Jody’s desire to create another family to replace the one that died (no matter how much she may protest that’s not so) fuels this emotional conflict. But the writing for it could be a lot better and not portray Jody as an emotional jellyfish. Also, there was no way she should have let Kaia go through the multiverse rip with Claire.

I noticed a lot of questions on social media about why Claire gets so much prominence in the backdoor pilot (and honestly, I hope the series doesn’t go the route of an ensemble cast where one character gets far more coverage than anyone else). Her being white and blonde seems a rather obvious factor. But more so is that as a character, she’s been around longer than any of the other characters in the spin-off (since season four’s “The Rapture”), though Kathryn Newton has only been playing Claire since season ten, when the character popped up again after a six-season hiatus.

Another cogent reason is that Claire is a legacy member of Team Free Will. Castiel has been wearing her (now-dead) father’s body since before he met the Brothers and she has also harbored him as a vessel. So, she has a direct “familial” connection to the Brothers. It helps that Newton seems pretty comfortable with all the physical stuff of the role.

That said, Claire, despite having a lot of roots in the mothershow, is still a bit nebulous in terms of motivation and character. I noted before that I thought making her lesbian – or at least bisexual – was actually a good idea. It defuses a potentially problematical aspect of her character to this point – she has developed a monumental crush on Dean, which has caused a fair amount of unease for both Dean and Jody.

Dean actually loves Claire dearly, enough that, as I said before, he was forced to leave the room when she took the torturous werewolf cure last season and didn’t want her to go through with it due to the high mortality rate. But he loves her as a father and would never, ever sleep with her. He is acutely aware of the fact that he is twice her age and that she is effectively his best friend’s mortal daughter. Claire may talk about how much she owes both Sam and Dean (and she does have a bond with Sam, as well). But she is carrying a big, bright, sparkly Daddy-Figure torch for Dean and this has caused him to put some emotional distance between them.

If Claire is gay, then this soft ground firms up considerably for the writers. The highly inappropriate puppy-dog-love chemistry with this scarred Hunter old enough to be her daddy becomes much less squicky and turns into more appropriate father-daughter chemistry.

Dean has also distanced himself because he appears to blame himself for her self-destructive path into Hunting and sees himself as a terrible role model. Jody, on the other hand, appears to see that Dean’s very mental health issues make him a good role model for troubled young Hunters like Claire because he is a survivor who has used his own damage to become a Hero. A damaged person like Dean, much more than some unattainable paragon of virtue, gives hope to the damaged people who enter Hunting as a major avocation or even full-time profession. Him they can emulate.

One problem is that Claire strives to be like Dean without quite understanding who Dean is or what makes him a great Hunter and Hero. Claire goes in, half-cocked and guns blazing, without understanding that one of the most cunning, sneaky, and strategic people in the SPNverse is Dean Winchester. If Dean does go in big, dumb and beautiful, that’s a tactic, not a sign that he’s too dopey or prideful to do it any other way.

Claire, now being fully orphaned, also doesn’t quite get Dean’s loyalty and devotion to family. The person who gets this, weirdly enough, is Alex. So, while Claire thinks she’s being like Dean, Alex is being like Dean. Claire is more like season-one Sam in that she is seeking revenge and being a hot-head. Alex is staying home and backing Jody up. We even saw her save Jody from a brainwashed Mary last season.

Alex also has important support skills in that she is now a nurse or in nursing school, or something. Let’s hope the show actually starts researching emergency medicine a bit better from now on to suit her role (because she and the others will probably be back, at least on the mothershow). Alex (like Sam) is really only in Hunting out of loyalty to Jody and also (like Sam) feels tainted by her years with a vampire family. Like Sam, Alex is seeking a kind of normal that is so idealized it probably doesn’t exist, while not feeling especially worthy of it or able to identify and find it.

Unfortunately, while Alex got in some good Dean-style lines (“You look like Biker Barbie”), she had very little development aside from some bonding with Claire and Jody. She was effectively shunted aside by all the other characters.

So, let’s talk about Patience. Patience got a full-episode introduction earlier this season in the eponymous “Patience” (13.03). Admittedly, she comes off as bland and low-key in this one compared to all the over-the-topness of certain other characters, but I think her character arc worked the best of them.

Alex desires Normal. Patience just left Normal behind in Atlanta and went off on a Hero’s Journey. She wants to use her power of prophecy to help people. She even basically got disowned by her father in the previous episode for leaving to come to Jody’s. So, Patience may look boring at the moment, but a lot is going on with her.

In addition, Patience also had a few checks on her ego about the above big mission to save others. For one thing, everyone else (except for Kaia, who was kinda grandfathered in) knew a lot more about Hunting and handling guns than she did. For another, the vision that sent her to Jody’s in the first place to try to save Claire ended up saving no one. Not only did it come true, but Patience belatedly realized that it came true because she had misinterpreted it. What she had thought was Claire’s death was actually Claire grieving over Kaia’s death. Prophecy isn’t quite as straightforward as she thought or as the show made it look in her first episode. This is humbling for her.

It’s also really, really nice to see an African American woman who isn’t a condescending stereotype. Patience is boring, middle-class, and academically smart, and that’s the whole point. Technically, she doesn’t have to be there. She has a stable home she could return to. Despite losing her mother and grandmother at a young age, she’s not rocked by trauma and forced out onto the road. She’s a volunteer. She just wants to do something good with her gift.

What makes no sense, though (and I can’t believe I’m saying this because I hated the incessant, years-long focus on Sam’s psychic storyline), is that Sam never has a conversation with her about her visions. Her visions are almost exactly the same as his psychic abilities in the first two seasons, and her grandmother lampshaded Sam’s abilities like crazy back in season one. But nope, not a peep between Sam and Patience about it. Sam has no conversation with Kaia about it, either, for that matter, nor does Dean ever bring up with her the considerable amount of dreamwalking and travel beween worlds he’s done. That absence was glaring to me.

But unlike some fans, I actually don’t mind the women being on the show and I think the focus on the spin-off gave the writing a direction last season distinctly lacked (let’s be honest – Lucifer on the Loose was boring as hell. So was anything to do with the LoL). But considering Sam and Dean are the inspiration for the formation of the Wayward Sisters in-verse, the least the show could do was have some more expression about what that means. A little vague mumbling from Claire and Jody about how Sam and Dean are missing (really? Those guys go missing more often than a tomcat on the prowl) and the women owe them doesn’t cut it. I’d like to see how that thinking has evolved to this point. I mean, hell, every time Bobby and/or Rufus popped up in their later appearances, the show practically went into hagiography mode. I did not sense anything inspirational or special about the Brothers’ appearance in this episode (though there were hints with Dean in the Patience episode).

The Good

As for SPN being sexist or misogynistic, simply put, it’s not. Women have always been portrayed as Hunters or potential Hunters in the show. They handle weapons. They kill things. They kick ass.

Patience was actually slapped on the back for killing a human-like monster this week. Women don’t get to kill anything on American TV without a huge negative deal made about it, let alone praised for it. Yet, after the Sisters killed all those things, it was Miller Time. The only dampener was the loss of a comrade, not any squeamishness or guilt over killing monsters.

The potential for a female-led storyline has always been there, which is a lot more than I can say for The Vampire Diaries (where the two male leads metaphorically smothered the female lead) or The Originals (where women are either victims or evil bitches – sorry, evil witches), two supposedly female-oriented CW dark fantasy shows that utterly fail to be feminist.

Legends of Tomorrow plays up Sara’s character a whole lot, but the sole other female character (who is always a WoC) seems to get switched in and out interchangeably, rendering women barely a third of the cast. Similarly, male characters also dominate Arrow and the female characters are either love interests, annoying little sister types or screeching harpies (oh, hello, Laurel).

I love Kara and her sister’s relationship on Supergirl (not to mention Alex’s coming out), but dear God, if I have to hear her apologize and grovel one more time for something a male lead never would have been dunned on, I’m gonna scream. Same deal with iZombie and the title character having to be “nice” to everyone (she’s a freakin’ zombie, people!).

Jane the Virgin is female-centric, but it’s also basically a soap opera – very traditional roles for women. And have you seen lowest-rated-show-in-network-history-for-two-whole-seasons Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? Sure, the songs are bouncy, but between the songs are long, arid, grim stretches of the title character actually being a crazy ex-girlfriend, doing things that a male character in film or TV rom-com or adventure would be considered heroic for doing (even though, in the real world, they would indeed be creepy and stalkerish). The only difference is that it’s a woman doing it and women are never portrayed positively doing this stuff. It’s a really negative portrayal.

This baffles me, since Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is hailed as feminist, yet it’s about as anti-feminist as it can be. It breaks no new cinematic ground whatsoever.

There’s The 100 (which I never got into much), but even they did a Bury Your Gay Girls storyline and the showrunners never figured out why that was a problem.

Black Lightning started out a bit iffy on that score (Lynn and her youngest daughter are both rather annoying cliches at the start), but Anissa at the drug store was about the most badass intro to a character’s new powers under fluorescent lighting since we saw Demon!Dean take out an Amara fan at the beginning of season ten. Any showrunners for the “Wayward Sisters” spin-off ought to have taken notes.

There’s a reason why some female viewers like SPN but really dislike other CW shows. And it’s not self-hate or internalized misogyny. The CW claims to have young women as its target audience, but most of its entries are every bit as sexist and misogynistic as the rest of TV.

Not a surprise, considering the network is no more welcoming to women and People of Color as producers than any other network. The pro-Girl Power thing is all just a big marketing dodge. On Supernatural, it’s downright refreshing to see women kill multiple human-like monsters, handle guns, and brag about their weapons collection, without an ounce of remorse or squeamishness (and several actresses from Samantha Ferris to Cyndy Sampson to Marisa Ramirez to Kim Rhodes and Briana Buckmaster have commented over the years on how refreshing it is to get to handle weapons and do real stunts). Go team.

This is usually the point where we get into how a woman can be strong and feminist without wielding a gun or other weapon. And that’s true. But don’t discount the number of contortions TV or film writers go through to avoid having women – ordinary women – get physical in fights and, especially, handle guns. If the only way a woman can be strong compared to men is never in a fight, that’s a problem. If the only way a woman can be strong compared to ordinary men is if she has superpowers (especially if she has to keep apologizing for having them), that’s a big problem. Supernatural doesn’t have that problem. It never did.

Dabb isn’t all that great a writer or showrunner, and he lacks the kind of support Kripke had in the early years. But the world of SPN was established years before he came on board. It is one that has always portrayed characters from many walks of life, both genders, different cultures, different ethnicities, and GLBT who were solid Hunters, years before that was actually fashionable. It’s easy to forget that shows like Highlander portrayed women as physically and even mentally inferior to men, to the point where it seemed a ludicrous idea that a woman Immortal could ever win the Game without cheating. Hence, the female-lead sequel, Raven, bombed horribly, despite having a likable female lead who had been a fan favorite on the previous show. Admittedly, the unlikable male lead and the misogynistic writing didn’t help, but neither did six seasons of the previous show telling us an Immortal woman was so useless in a fight that even a really ancient Immortal like Cassandra couldn’t team up with Methos and take out the rest of the Horsemen. Or any of the Horsemen, for that matter, despite her being almost as old as they were.

As for the much-vaunted Buffy and Angel, if you watch them again, you’ll see a lot of traditional gender roles for women who aren’t superpowered superheroes. For every Buffy, there are five Willows or even Freds. Shows where women are regularly shown as strong, capable and lethal in a physical fight (like Xena: Warrior Princess, or even the far-more-recent Lost Girl) are rare. And even then, the women in Xena wore some pretty revealing outfits clearly not intended to attract a straight female audience (though the Xena showrunners happily pandered to the enthusiastically lesbian portion of their fandom that grew up, at least for the most part).

So, it was no small thing when, a full season before an annoyed Dean informed Jo Harvelle that he had no problems with female Hunters, just idiots, an equally annoyed Dean handed young Kat in “Asylum” a saltgun because she was the one with the gun skills and the moxie, not her dippy boyfriend. And it was Kat who tagged along with Dean and got some grumpy instruction in Hunting from him.

The show has definitely had its issues with portraying gender and women’s issues over the years (and the godawful fight scene in which Sam and Dean are dumbed down enough to get taken down by a lame hooded figure with a blade on a stick is unfortunately not a first), but it’s also tried hard to portray a world where women are in no way inferior to men, as a group, when it comes to battling supernaturally dangerous creatures. Even if that means physically.

This is how “Wayward Sisters” can have an all-female cast of new and established Hunter characters who still feel as though they belong in the SPNverse (as opposed to the obnoxiously snobby One Percenter monsters of “Bloodlines,” which felt like Supernatural: The Originals, which is not a compliment). The casting is extremely critical for such a show (as we saw with the casting of Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles). So, even though the writing for “Wayward Sisters” was creaky, cliched and often tonedeaf, while the direction was uncharacteristically clumsy for show veteran Phil Sgriccia, the chemistry the women on this team have (which is mostly considerable) overcame that because it had the worldbuilding at its back (like Xena) rather than undercutting it (like Highlander: The Raven). The new show can always get new, and better, showrunners, certainly better writers, but none of that would do it any good if the cast chemistry weren’t there.

Fortunately, the cast chemistry is there, especially for Jody and Donna, and Claire and Alex. Patience is bland, but the actress seems capable of taking her somewhere (her reaction to her first monster kill was a hoot) with some decent writing.

So, while there are definitely improvements to be made, and some things could go horrendously wrong (especially with the current showrunning and writing team), I think there are some solid bones here on which to build a new show. Too bad it didn’t get picked up.

Next: War of the Worlds: The Nepotism Duo return with another confusing tale about the alt-SPNverse, Lucifer, alt-Michael and Asmodeus.

I’ll be doing my live recap of “The Thing” here later tonight or tomorrow. I’ll try to catch up with the recaps of the rest of the season before Thursday night. Wish me luck.

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My collected recaps and reviews of season one, which first appeared on Innsmouth Free Press, are now up (with a few extras) on Kindle. The Kindle version is available through Amazon. The print version is also up. If you buy the print version, you get a Kindle copy thrown in for free.

Starting now.

Overlong recap introducing all the female characters who would be in the spin-off, should it occur. Could be edited down a bit. Definitely needs something more than a rather boring hard rock tune that sounds as though they got a knockoff of a Melissa Etheridge song instead of getting an actual Melissa Etheridge song. “Royal Station 4/16” would have done nicely here. Or maybe “Ruins.” Or “2001.”

Just sayin’: 2:13 is an awfully long montage, especially set to generic rock.

Cut to Patience showing up at Jody’s door. She’s had a vision and it involves Jody apparently dying.

Cut to Now.

In some random shack in the middle of nowhere, two werewolves disguised as white-trash lowlifes (not a real stretch) are threatening a young girl who kinda looks like the girl ghost in season two’s “Playthings.” A delivery truck shows up (we get a rather CGI’d overhead view of it coming in). It’s Claire, disguised as a delivery girl. The one werewolf who was taunting the little girl is so dumb, he has to read the address label saying “Mr. Werewolf” before he gets it. Half a second later, he gets a shotgun load in the gut that tosses him across the room.

The second werewolf puts up more of a fight and bloodies Claire’s lip a bit before she stabs him. Then a mother werewolf shows up just to get shot. Yeah, the dialogue’s not the best this week.

As Claire sends the girl back to her mother, she gets a call from Jody. Jody reprises Dean’s line about John not having been home for a few days, this time for the Brothers Winchester, and asks Claire to come back to her house.

Cue title cards, which seem a little more extended than usual.

At the house, Jody and Alex are determining that Donna and Walt (still salty he’s still alive) haven’t heard from Sam and Dean, either. Gee, where were these idiots when Sam and Dean got locked up in a sooper-sekrit government facility last year for a month and a half? For that matter, what about when Dean went missing in Purgatory for a year? Sam and/or Dean go missing all the time, so why the DEFCON-1 alert status all of a sudden?

Claire arrives and the sneak peek about her awkward reunion with Alex and Jody ensues, as well as her introduction to Patience. As cocky and arrogant as Claire is in this scene, I can grok her being upset about Patience appearing to have replaced her. FYI, Jody, if you really want to get Claire to come back home, maybe don’t turn her room into storage or hand off her clothing to some random new girl five minutes before you know she’s arriving. That doesn’t rhyme with “Welcome back.”

Patience seems quite bland, including after Alex leaves to go to work at the hospital (Claire is annoyed because she thinks all hands should be on deck for finding the Brothers) and when she starts relating her vision. It turns out Jody doesn’t die in it – Claire does. Maybe.

Claire turns bratty and says that sitting back and making a plan is a bad idea. Yeah…um…no. Pretty sure that’s the best idea, girl. Then she storms out. It’s rather sad that this is what she got from watching Dean. Dean’s the most cold-blooded planner of them all. That’s why he’s still here.

Oh, and they’ve been clued into Kaia’s existence by a phone message from Sam.

Meanwhile, it turns out to be a good idea that Alex went off to work, since Kaia has been found by the roadside and loaded into an ambulance, while some creepy, hissing thing watches from the shadows. Quickie flashback during all this to the coda from last week when the Brothers first arrived in the Bad Place.

At the hospital, Alex is being the perfect nurse and we finally get some good lines. After Claire comments on her nurse scrubs, Alex shoots back: “It’s a uniform. What’s your excuse?”

Claire: I look great.

Alex: You look like Biker Barbie.

They have a discussion about how Alex knew about the vision and their differing approaches to protecting Jody. As they do, Alex is looking up Kaia in the system and finds a Jane Doe just being checked into the hospital. Wow. How plot-convenient.

When Claire goes down there, Kaia spots her and they share an intensely slashy staring contest right before Kaia decides to do a runner. I facepalm at this show’s really poor knowledge of medicine. Once again. Ain’t nobody going nowhere with the colossal headache that comes from a concussion, let alone with Kaia’s fleetness of foot.

Claire comes in and cuts right to the chase, saying she knows Sam and Dean. Kaia, apparently having completely reset her learning curve from the beginning of the previous episode, tries to run away, anyway. Until she’s accosted outside by the creepy thing that was stalking her. It has glowing red eyes, kicks Claire’s ass, gets shot by Jody (who, also conveniently, pops up out of nowhere) and then bleeds fluorescent blue blood when Claire stabs it in the throat.

And then they take the body home, where Alex pulls on some gloves and gets cracking on an autopsy with almost obscene glee. The Brothers would be so proud.

Claire talks to Kaia. They compare scars and Kaia talks about the Bad Place, how she knows the creature from there and they usually “travel in packs.” I know some really like Kaia, but so far, she seems to have about three emotional settings – Coward, Victim, and Tremulous Hero – and I’m quickly growing tired of all of them. Anyhoo, Claire asks her about Sam and Dean.

It’s more interesting in the garage, where Alex is pulling off the creature’s mask to reveal lots of mandibles. Alex and Jody suggest Patience not scream. Patience suggests that puking is more likely. Claire enters and informs them that Kaia knows what the creature is. Kaia offers that she is a dreamwalker and then fills in the others on how she helped the Brothers open a rift (she doesn’t mention Jack) and they got stuck in the Bad Place. She’s sure that if they did, they are already dead, but Claire says that the rift is still open, so they can go find the Brothers.

Cut to Sam and Dean (who are actually not dead at all), and immediately, the banter improves. Dean is eating a lizard over a fire (“It’s a lizard, Sam – it tastes like lizard”), while Sam is cringing and saying they should go find the rift. Dean points out that the last rift only lasted “a couple of hours” and they’ve already been there two days. So, the rift could be already closed, they could be there for a while, and Sam needs to suck it up and eat something.

When they hear a faraway monster call that seems to be approaching, they run away, but not before Dean goes back to grab the rest of the lizard.

Back at Jody’s, Alex finds Patience punking out and packing to leave. Patience is freaked out and says she’s “not a fighter.” Maybe if she goes back now, Daddy will take her back. Alex points out that Patience can’t just turn back the clock like that and that there’s more to dealing with the supernatural world than fighting. Patience leaves, anyway, but when she reaches the car, she has a vision of more creatures bursting through the windows. She runs back inside and tells them, including a skeptical Claire, that they all have to leave. Kaia says they’re after her.

Later, we see the creatures burst through the windows, just as Patience predicted. But the girls are watching it on a security cam from the car. They’ve already left for the barge. Patience, who is driving, asks Claire if she believes her now.

After daybreak, Jody has them stop. She tells them she called in backup. Donna shows up, armed to the teeth (including a flamethrower – and y’all wonder why Dean has so much Ducky love for her?). She has become a vampire hunter and it seems she’s quite good at it. It turns out they don’t actually know where they’re going, yet, because Kaia didn’t know and needs some prodding to come up with enough clues for Jody and Alex to figure out it’s the Larsen Brothers Shipyard off Route 14.

Jody and Donna decide to go on ahead. Jody leaves Claire in charge of Alex and the civilians and Claire reluctantly agrees.

Meanwhile, in Monster Land, Sam and Dean are being stalked by a refugee from Sword of Shannara, a hooded figure with a spear who manages to take out both of them. I call shenanigans on this. Maybe the figure could take out Sam, who hasn’t been eating much the past day or two, but Dean? Dean survived a year in Purgatory and came out on top. He even had fun. And he fights multiple demons with relative ease. Plus, he and Sam would be armed to the teeth. Why don’t they have their guns out at least?

It doesn’t help that the fight is very poorly done in typical choppy Arrowverse style (that’s not a compliment) where there is so much cutting to cover up the lack of fighting skills among certain parties that you can barely see what’s happening. Nope. Not at all impressed. The show’s done pretty well so far in avoiding dumbing down the Brothers to make a new character look better, but this is an egregious exception.

Jody and Donna scope out the shipyard and then go in. The incidental music for this scene is rather cool. They pass by an angel sword melted into the ground and hear a hissing from the upper deck of the ship (looks like a ferry) they’re on.

Back at Base Camp, Kaia and Claire bond (more slashy overtones) over Kaia realizing Claire is scared. Claire admits that she’s been shaken by Patience’s vision. Why she’s admitting this to Kaia, I just don’t know. But when she declares that “Sam and Dean saved my life” and she has to return the favor, Kaia offers to come with. I know this is intended to make Kaia look heroic, but it sounds vaguely ridiculous: “I was a cowardly lion when those menz were around, but I shall follow you to the ends of the multiverse, fair lady.”

Not helping is that the show’s writers (who are downright obsessed with their meta) seem blissfully unaware that this whole storyline is an old and very sexist Western trope as old as the media hills known as “The menfolk are out on a cattle run/incapacitated, so it’s up to the little ladies to save the day.” And it’s looking as though we’re about to get the variation of “All the adults get themselves taken out, so now the kids have to save the day.” You’d think the show would at least bother with a little more onscreen explanation about why these random characters all immediately banded together to find and save Sam and Dean, seeing as how it’s still called Supernatural and the protagonists are still Sam and Dean.

On an upper deck, Jody and Donna find the rift. Jody wants to go in immediately because reasons – sorry, because she’s afraid that if she doesn’t go in right that second, Claire will and then will get killed. Or something. Points to Donna for thinking this reason is stupid, especially after Jody admits her thinking is clouded by not wanting to “lose another child.”

This conversation is cut off by their hearing more rift creatures. Well, duh, if the rift is open and these things hunt in packs, it makes perfect sense that not only one crossed over, y’know?

The creatures, btw, are exceedingly cheesy when alive and look exactly like what they are – stuntmen in monster costumes.

Over in Monster Land, Sam wakes up at night and Dean, who is already awake, calls the figure with the spear “Darth Dickwad,” even though it’s pretty obviously a female figure. The figure bangs on a giant skull and the creature they heard before responds from a distance.

Meanwhile, Claire and the others are saddling up, while Jody and Donna are stuck inside an abandoned car. They’re saved by Claire with a flamethrower. The others are just standing behind her, even though Jody warns that there’s “another one.”

Claire hears the hissing and immediately goes upstairs. Jody realizes it’s closing as it starts to fade. Claire insists on going in to save the Brothers.

Downstairs, Donna give Patience a (very) quick rundown on how to use a shotgun, but a whole bunch of creatures show up and the women flee upstairs. As Donna and Jody and the others hunt monsters, Claire goes into the rift with Kaia. Because let’s not leave the one person who knows how to go other worlds back in ours, or anything.

In the Bad Place, Claire and Kaia immediately find and cut Sam and Dean loose, but when they all run back to the rift, the hooded figure tosses its spear at Claire and hits Kaia instead when she steps in front of Claire. They hold hands and Kaia dies (here at the CW, we bury allllll our gays, especially if they’re WoCs!). The Brothers pull out angel swords, which the hooded figure apparently did not bother to take away from them (now they do? And what about their guns?), and Dean prevents Claire from going after the figure, who is now, you know, totally unarmed. The three of them flee back through rift, but not before some creepy giant CGI troll shows up and peers over the trees.

As Jody cradles Claire, Patience (who has finally made her first monster kill) realizes that was her vision and Kaia was the one who died.

Afterward, the Brothers leave, asking Jody to thank Claire when Claire is able to hear it. The adults worry about more rifts and more creatures, but Jody assures the Brothers that since they’ve got saving the world covered, she and the girls can take care of Sioux Falls.

Claire mourns and Jody has a talk with her. Claire finally realizes that going in half-cocked gets innocent people killed.

Downstairs, Patience is still shocked at having ganked something and Claire starts a journal. There’s a cheesy voiceover from Claire about how she needs “my family…my army,” and she’s going to kill the thing that killed Kaia, as they montage at the dinner table.

Meanwhile, a big old rift appears again in Sioux Falls and through it steps the hooded figure, which pulls back its hood to reveal an evil, smirking Kaia, because killing off a redshirt character we’ve barely met and have no investment in, but who appeared to be a regular, and replacing her (it’s frequently a her) with an evil doppleganger isn’t a huge cliche at all.

Credits

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We need your help!

My collected recaps and reviews of season one, which first appeared on Innsmouth Free Press, are now up (with a few extras) on Kindle. The print version is also up, though the cover’s needing a little tweaking right now. I’ll be putting up corrections for the cover in the next day or so. Everything else looks good.

THE WITCH IS BACK – Dean (Jensen Ackles) falls victim to a couple of witches, sisters Jamie (guest star Jordan Clair Robbins) and Jennie Plum (guest star Elise Gatien), who manage to steal a powerful book of spells from the Winchester brothers. When Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean go after the book, they get help from a powerful and surprising ally when Rowena (guest star Ruth Connell), back from the dead, intervenes to assist them. Amanda Tapping directed the episode written by Steve Yockey (#1312). Original airdate 2/1/2018.

The CW’s midseason promo is up. If you blink, you’ll miss Sam and Dean at 0:10-12.

Warner Bros has announced details about the upcoming Wayward Sisters spin-off. As we already know, it will star Kim Rhodes (Jody Mills) and the rumor that Briana Buckmaster (Donna Hanscum) is in it was confirmed. Also starring will be Kathryn Newton (Claire Novak) and Alex Jones (Katherine Ramdeen), as well as new character Patience Turner (played by Clark Backo). Another new character, Kaia (Yadira Guevar-Prip), has been added to the main cast list. Kaia’s “gift” will be the ability to spirit travel.

The spin-off premise and new characters has been introduced via several episodes in season 13. Patience will be introduced in “Patience” (13.03), which also brings back season one character Missouri Moseley (who is Patience’s estranged grandmother and from whom Patience has inherited her psychic gift). The actual backdoor pilot will be “Wayward Sisters” (13.10). Donna will also get a major episode in “Breakdown” (13.11).

Star Kim Rhodes told EW that there’s a good in-SPNverse reason why the show will be set in a single location (Sioux Falls) instead of moving around. Rhymes with “Hellmouth,” I’ll bet. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion it’s to do with the rip between universes in that crappy old boat from 12.09.

The show is currently averaging a 0.6 in the demo, putting it second on the network and even with last season. Between this and the resurgence of Riverdale, the CW is the only broadcast network that has not dropped in average demo since last season.

The show had a repeat last week that came in at 0.2/1 in the demo (0.246 in the unrounded overnights) and 1.03 million in audience in the overnights. It was preempted by holiday programming during Christmas week.

Like this column? You can help keep it going by contributing monthly via Patreon (which includes perks), making a one-time donation through Paypal, or buying us a coffee.

Happy New Year Everyone!

We need your help!

My collected recaps and reviews of season one, which first appeared on Innsmouth Free Press, are now up (with a few extras) on Kindle. The print version is also up, though the cover’s needing a little tweaking right now. I’ll be putting up corrections for the cover in the next day or so. Everything else looks good.

TIME TO RETURN THE FAVOR – Donna (guest star Briana Buckmaster) calls Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) for help after her niece, Wendy (guest star Sarah Dugdale), goes missing. The three hunters discover Wendy was kidnapped by a man who sells human parts to monsters in a grotesque online auction and race to save her before it is too late. Amyn Kaderali directed the episode written by Davy Perez (#1311). Original airdate 1/25/2018.

Alexander Calvert gave an interview to Elle in which he talked about the fandom’s reaction to him, convention life, and the Instagram account he and his girlfriend have up for his very fluffy and adorable cat, The Lord Tyrion.

Set info is coming out about episode 13.14 (“Only the Best Intentions”), which began filming on January 2. Christian Keys (alt-Michael) tweeted a photo of himself with Calvert as they went back to filming in the new year (Calvert also tweeted about filming in a forest). This indicates alt-Michael and Jack will be in 13.14 and interacting in the same scene. It appears that alt-Bobby will also be in this episode, since Jim Beaver tweeted a first-look selfie the next day and mentioned filming with Samantha Smith (Mary) in mud (reportedly in Belcarra Park in Port Moody). She responded in the same thread by showing her alt-verse costume on the floor. Hmmm, could it be our alt-world cast are now in the SPNverse as of 13.14? Or in the Bad Place? Or do they get back in this episode, since there’s filming in the quarry that’s the alt-verse set this week?

Danneel and her husband will be opening up their new brewery, The Family Business, for … uh … business in Dripping Springs, TX on my birthday. And I’ll be stuck up here. Oh, well.

CW head Mark Pedowitz has re-upped his contract with the network. He also issued his annual “This show isn’t going anywhere until the leads hang it up” announcement. While he was cagey in a recent interview about making it official (because they’re not ready to announce show renewals), it’s highly doubtful the show won’t get a 14th season – and a full one, at that – unless Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles don’t want to return.

Supernatural alumnus Sterling K. Brown (Gordon Walker) won a Golden Globe award this week for best actor in his latest role in series This Is Us. He’d previously won an Emmy last fall for the same role.

Warner Bros has announced details about the upcoming Wayward Sisters spin-off. As we already know, it will star Kim Rhodes (Jody Mills) and the rumor that Briana Buckmaster (Donna Hanscum) is in it was confirmed. Also starring will be Kathryn Newton (Claire Novak) and Alex Jones (Katherine Ramdeen), as well as new lead character Patience Turner (played by Clark Backo). Another new character, Kaia (Yadira Guevar-Prip), has been added to the main cast list. Kaia’s “gift” will be the ability to spirit travel.

The spin-off premise and new characters will be introduced via several episodes in season 13. Patience will be introduced in “Patience” (13.03), which also brings back season one character Missouri Moseley (who is Patience’s estranged grandmother and from whom Patience has inherited her psychic gift). The actual backdoor pilot will be “Wayward Sisters” (13.10).

Star Kim Rhodes told EW that there’s a good in-SPNverse reason why the show will be set in a single location (Sioux Falls) instead of moving around. Rhymes with “Hellmouth,” I’ll bet. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion it’s to do with the rip between universes in that crappy old boat from 12.09.

The show is currently averaging a 0.6 in the demo, putting it second on the network and even with last season. Between this and the resurgence of Riverdale, the CW is the only broadcast network that has not dropped in average demo since last season.

The show had a repeat last week that came in at 0.2/1 in the demo (0.246 in the unrounded overnights) and 1.03 million in audience in the overnights. It was preempted by holiday programming during Christmas week.

Like this column? You can help keep it going by contributing monthly via Patreon (which includes perks), making a one-time donation through Paypal, or buying us a coffee.

We need your help!

Contribute monthly via Patreon (which includes perks), make a one-time donation through Paypal, or buy us a coffee. Want more of my recaps and reviews? Check out The Supernatural Codex: Season 1, out on Kindle and in print.

[lots o’ spoilers ahead]

While this episode was by no means perfect, I’m happy to report my relief when I first watched it that it was not half as boring as the previous one, albeit it ran a trifle long in some spots (it was only about two minutes over the usual time, but some of that dragged a bit). I was also pleased to find, despite some serious flaws in the character’s central conflict, that I rather liked Patience and the actress who played her. This was a very good thing. After “Rising Son,” I was beginning to wonder if it was time to hang it up with this show.

I was also happy to discover that even though this was the first of the lead-up episodes to the backdoor pilot for the new spin-off, Wayward Sisters, it had a fair bit of conflict and action involving Sam and Dean, who each had a storyline this week. Last season suffered greatly from Sam and Dean: Guest Stars in Their Own Show Syndrome. So far this season, that’s been greatly alleviated, at least for Jensen Ackles, who’s not fielding any newborns at home this year.

The funniest (and most reassuring in terms of how the new show will go over with fans) thing is that everyone has a different favorite. They like Claire, but they hate Patience. They like Kaia, but they hate Alex. They think Jody and Donna should be Hunting, but just together and not with any younger charges. Nobody can agree except that a lot of fans have already picked a favorite, if only in relation to at least one other character they feel shouldn’t be on the show. This indicates that fans in general have already got past the initial phase of accepting the overall concept of a group of women Hunting together and mentoring each other. They just can’t agree on which characters they think should be in that group. Considering most fans can’t really agree on liking Sam, Dean, Castiel, Crowley, and so on, even after 13 seasons, that’s a good sign for Wayward Sisters, not bad.

Which is not to say the episode (or even the new show’s franchise concept so far) lacks flaws. Missouri Moseley returns in this one. Remember her? Season one? Kripke-penned “Home”? Let me refresh your memory – she was an African American psychic who fawned over Sam a lot and smacked Dean upside the head for … uh … reasons. Or something. That Missouri.

Now, obviously, there was some unfinished business between her and the Brothers, so you could say she had a reason to come back. Was this addressed? Nope. Sam doesn’t even see Missouri this time round. He’s too busy babysitting Jack for more than a quick phone call, and he and Dean have a fight over just sending Jody to deal with it before Dean goes off to help her. Dean gets no apology or even acknowledgement of any kind from her about her previous treatment of him (though she does commiserate with him on his “recent losses,” which she senses in his mind, so there’s that). In fact, when he makes the logical protest to her staying behind (while there’s a psychic-eating monster on the loose), Missouri’s Inner Bitch comes roaring out. Consider those loose ends still dangling.

Anyway, she’s only there to introduce a younger, prettier psychic, her granddaughter Patience. God forbid the CW have an older, gifted female (let alone an older female PoC) character as a main lead. I didn’t love the way Missouri was fridged to jumpstart the title character’s story.

It bothered me that not only were the two PoC female leads for Wayward Sisters introduced very late in the day, but they were introduced in a fundamentally different way from that of Claire and Alex, who were introduced as victims of the supernatural (like Sam, Dean, Jody and Donna), rather than as essentially supernatural beings (like Patience and Kaia). Also, the CW has an extremely poor track record with PoC female characters with powers, wherein they end up powerful handmaidens to white girls. Bonnie from The Vampire Diaries fairly leaps to mind here.

Not helping is the way Patience’s father, James, is portrayed. It’s one thing to be introduced to the supernatural world in a traumatic way. A lot of people will go straight to denial, initially, as the show has demonstrated many times. But James was raised in the Life. He knows the supernatural exists. Hell, he can even work divination magic. He just wants to stick his head in the sand, even if it gets his mother and daughter killed.

The thing is that if you read between the lines (and remember how Missouri was introduced almost 12 seasons ago), there’s plenty of reason for James to resent his mother. Missouri dragged him along with her on down the road to Hunting supernatural things and it seems pretty clear that it traumatized him. The catalyst for their final estrangement may have been Missouri’s cocky miscalculation about the fate of his wife (Patience’s mother), but it’s clear a lot of bad things happened before that.

But the writing wants us to believe that James is the bad guy here. Since the episode never addresses the stark contrast in how Missouri treated Sam (with powers) and Dean (no powers as far she could see) in season one, it neatly avoids addressing the pretty stark contrast between Missouri’s treatment of James her son (no apparent powers) and Patience her granddaughter (practically a Mary Sue). Missouri is a bigot when it comes to plain, old, ordinary humans. It’s therefore a tad difficult to believe the episode’s portrayal of James – a man old enough to have a teenage daughter and successful enough to be raising her in a safe, nurturing, upper-middle-class environment – as too immature to forgive his saintly mother.

It doesn’t help that the episode is wildly inconsistent in portraying Missouri and Patience’s talents. Dean tells Jody that Missouri can read objects, but what we actually see her do, for the most part, is read minds to a limited extent and foretell the future in blurry images. That’s not reading the past from objects, Show. Reading objects is a different ESP talent.

Also, we’re apparently supposed to get the idea from that that she is able to foretell her and the MOTW’s futures enough to determine that she can’t escape the MOTW, at least not without endangering her family (she specifically sees James, but then talks about Patience to him). How is this even possible when you have two new variables – Dean and Jody – in the equation? That smacks of overly convenient writing. You’d think Missouri would have learned from the mistake she made in predicting the fate of James’ wife/Patience’s mom that her powers are not infallible, but nope.

In addition, the family member who ends up in immediate danger is Patience, not James. Patience is threatened by the MOTW immediately after he kills her grandmother. It seems he was able to kill Missouri, and then zip past Dean and Jody to attack Patience before they could even contact James. I call shenanigans on that timing.

In fact, I call shenanigans on that whole MOTW, but let’s finish talking about Patience’s powers, first. Patience initially has a dream that warns her of both her grandmother’s death and the MOTW’s attack on her later at the school. This dream seems to be a mix of literal precognition (the attack) and metaphor (her grandmother’s ghost warning her). Okay, this is a dream we’re talking about, so a little funky logic is acceptable.

But then, after she’s captured, Patience has a prolonged waking vision of her father, Jody and then Dean being killed, which allows her to warn each of them about the MOTW’s attack. But this is a different kind of precog from what she previously showed and all three types are different from what Missouri had.

This may seem like nitpicking, but if you look at how Sam’s precog was shown in the first two seasons, it’s very consistent and that’s pretty important to the story. He has quick flashes, usually of something fatal happening, accompanied by nasty headaches. If he acts on them, he is usually able to stop the event from happening, though something else bad may happen, instead. Sometimes, he has dreams. Less often, he has waking visions. But they are always the same kind of thing.

Precog and even telepathy are shown similarly for other characters such as Psykids like Ava (in “Hunted”) and Andy (sending Dean a vision in “All Hell Breaks Loose, Part 1”), and even Chuck in “The Monster at the End of This Book.” We also have a clear origin for these visions. The Psykids apparently get theirs from Azazel, while Chuck gets them from the angels. Yes, I know we later find out Chuck is God, but his conversation with Zachariah at the end of that episode makes it clear the angels are sending him visions. Maybe they’re even sending them to the Psykids. Who knows? But the point is that these visions of the future don’t just pop up out of nowhere.

Missouri and Patience’s visions do, which means they’re much more malleable and “magical” in the sense of being overly convenient writing divorced from the logic of the worldbuilding. The characters don’t have these visions because the visions make sense in the context of the story. They have them just to move the story along.

Now let’s check out the MOTW. Unfortunately, whoever made up the recap spoiled the crap out of the MOTW “surprise” (admittedly, that cat came right out of the bag in the teaser, anyway), which is that the MOTW was a Wraith. I don’t think a Wraith was the right MOTW for what the episode wanted to do and the actor they got was definitely not right to convey what they wanted. Or maybe he was, which kinda makes it worse.

Now, the Wraith’s targeting psychics was fine, as far as it went. We know Wraiths like to feed on a specific kind of human, often a “soft” target that can’t fight back very well. And therein lies the problem. The Wraith we first met in “Sam, Interrupted” in season five was working at a psych hospital, targeting patients. If they weren’t psychotic when they came in, they sure were by the time the Wraith was ready to feed on them. The Wraith possessed a toxin, spread via touch, that made people psychotic. This particular Wraith actually enjoyed the taste of brains under extreme psychological distress and played an Angel of Mercy to get them. Subsequent mentions of them followed a similar pattern.

Aside from targeting those who generally can’t fight back very well (psychics, who are otherwise ordinary humans), the Wraith in “Patience” follows none of these rules. He doesn’t bother to poison or weaken his targets. He simply attacks them and overpowers them.

He doesn’t treat them as food, either. The actor who plays the Wraith plays feeding as a straight-up sexual serial-killing thing, which is not how the Wraith in “Sam, Interrupted” acted. The Wraith in “Patience” attacks women, specifically, and creeps all over them. The Wraith in “Sam, Interrupted” attacked different types of people, which actually made it scarier because it was hard to see a pattern at first, let alone who could be the Wraith. You couldn’t see it coming.

In “Patience,” we know right away. There’s no mystery about it whatsoever, especially since there is no attempt to give any backstory to the MOTW aside from where he got his predilection for psychic brains. It’s all very CW. In a bad way.

And it also means that the Wraith is way overpowered for this type of MOTW. I can see him taking out James, maybe even Jody, if he got lucky. But Dean? On top of the other two? Nope. Not the organized and well-armed way they came in.

Now, if the writers had used an MOTW that was known for being fast and strong, I might buy that. A Vampire or a Shapeshifter or a Djinn I could see. Or if they’d argued that this was the Alpha Wraith, maybe. But as it was, I didn’t buy this particular MOTW, or his ability to fight and evade and take down healthy human prey.

Hell, even Patience was able to break off the Wraith’s stinger (the way Dean did in “Sam, Interrupted,” albeit while barely able to stay upright due to being poisoned). Not exactly an intimidating monster. I just didn’t buy that he could take Dean at full strength, let alone Dean on top of Jody and James. And if the MOTW wasn’t that dangerous, that makes Patience’s precog flashes rather silly and unnecessary to the plot.

I got the impression that we were supposed to have the usual balance of opinions between Sam and Dean this week, where Sam was on one side and Dean on the other, and we were supposed to see both sides as having merit. Which was sort of true if you squinted, but only because the writing kept Telling us Dean’s judgement was off, while actually Showing something a bit different.

For a start, not only is Dean in character for telling Patience at the end to grab as much Normal as she can, but he’s right. Hunting never ends well for the Hunter. As Dean has put it many different ways in the past, “it ends bloody or sad … you’re covered in blood until you’re covered in your own blood.”

So, when Jody tells Patience that Dean’s wrong and that if Patience wants to get into the Life and use her “gift,” she can call her, I just want to suggest that Jody first tell Patience why she lived alone in a big, old, empty house before she took in Claire and Alex. Gee, whatever happened to her husband and son? Patience deserves to hear that story before she makes her decision.

Yes, the supernatural world is the real world on this show. Yes, once you become aware of it, you see it everywhere. Even worse, it becomes aware of you. But step into the shadows, engage too closely, and your projected lifespan drops like a stone.

Dean’s not wrong (neither is James, really). It’s just very hard to get away from the supernatural world once you get plunged into it.

Then there’s Sam’s “training” of Jack. Points, at least, for the show having Sam remember that he used to be psychic, too … sort of. Sam talks about being different when he was younger and worrying about having a “darkness” inside him, that Dean and Castiel helped him fight it, so there’s that. But then Sam proceeds (as he always has) to make it All About Sam and try to push Jack into learning more about his powers, even though it’s really obvious that Jack is afraid to use them.

Now, Jack does mention Dean saying he’s evil, but he also brings up the reasons why Dean feels that way and agrees with them. He did kill his mother by being born. He has hurt people. He has lost control of his powers. He even mentions feeling Asmodeus in his mind, pushing him and coopting his powers, during his attempt to raise the Shedim the previous episode. But what Sam mostly latches onto (as he very belatedly decides to stop pushing Jack) is that Jack is afraid of Dean (despite being physically invulnerable), not that Sam is doing pretty much the same thing to Jack that Asmodeus did and for equally selfish reasons – and that this bothers Jack a whole lot.

When Dean gets back, the hints throughout the episode that all is not well with him (such as Jody holding him back when he starts to ream James out for lying to Patience) come to a head. Sam calls Dean on being so harsh to Jack and threatening him (even though Dean’s been very upfront about that, so it should hardly be a surprise to Sam).

To the writers’ credit, they do have Dean finally calling Sam out right back on Sam’s less-than-altruistic motives for getting Jack to learn how to control his powers, saying that Sam doesn’t really care about Jack. He just wants to use Jack’s powers to get Mary back, using Jack as “an interdimensional can opener.” And there isn’t a whole in this episode that contradicts Dean on that point.

Dean would never come out and say this, but Sam’s example of himself as a person Dean saved in spite of Sam’s being a “freak” is also a poor one – Sam hurt a lot of people because Dean didn’t kill him. Not that the angels and demons would have allowed Sam to stay dead, but still.

In the end, Dean can’t hold back. His barely leashed pain and rage pour out as he yells that he “can’t even look at the kid” because he blames Jack directly for losing Mary and Castiel.

Unfortunately, he does that as Jack is listening nearby (which seems uncharacteristically dumb). This accidentally sparks Jack’s powers as Jack spontaneously tries to do something “good” and also reaches out to his foster daddy, Castiel. In the process, Castiel wakes up someplace dark and weird.

But that’s for next time.

Next: The Big Empty: While trying to figure out who is killing a grief counselor’s patients, the Brothers and Jack end up in family therapy. Meanwhile, Castiel wakes up somewhere dark and strange.

This is, by the way, the first of the backdoor pilot episodes for the projected spin-off, intended to introduce the title character.

Standard recap of the season so far, as well of Wraiths. Pretty Jack-heavy and includes a brief bit about Sam’s demon-blood drinking. Nothing particularly exciting and no rock songs used.

Cut to Now in Omaha, NE. A young blonde woman is dusting a photo of her with Missouri and closing up shop for the night. She’s a professional psychic. The door opens and a man comes in. She starts to tell him she’s closed, but agrees to do one last job for the evening. I’m sure this will end well.

She does some Tarot cards and answers his questions about her being a “psychic counselor.” She says she reads “energies, auras.” He asks her to read his and realizes he’s a Wraith. He stabs her in the hand and then eats her brain while looking sexual aroused. Yup.

Cue title cards.

At the Bunker, cue the sneak peek as Dean is listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Rip This Joint” through headphones while drinking a lot of beer. In his room, Jack gets a knock on the door from Sam, who has a boring, insipid video message of emotional support from beyond the grave (since Jack killed her being born) from Saint Kelly on a thumb drive (product placement, much?). As this plays, Sam gets a call from Missouri Moseley from season one’s “Home.” She’s at the scene of Doomed Teaser Psychic’s shop and is asking for help while apologizing for “being a stranger.”

Sam gets off the phone and tells Dean who it was. He says Missouri told him she’d got out of the Life for a while, but had been pulled back in by a case and that he put Jody on it because they need to stay at the Bunker and help Jack hone his powers, so he can open the rift again to rescue Mary–sorry, be all that he can be. Dean calls Sam right out on his false compassion for Jack and says he “didn’t sign up for” babysitting the baby “Antichrist,” nor is he thrilled that Sam is putting Jody in potential danger like that. So, off he goes to help her with the Hunt.

Gotta say, I’m with Dean on this one.

So, in broad daylight the next day (it was night when Missouri called Sam), Jody is talking a policeman for Missouri when Dean drives up. Missouri explains to Jody that the DTP, named Dede, was her “protegee” and about the closest thing she currently has to family. When Dean arrives, he hugs Missouri first and Missouri gives condolences on his losses. There is zero reference to the fact that she was a complete bitch to him the last time they met.

Inside the house, Dean and Missouri both suspect the killer was a Wraith and Missouri gets from a series of images by feeling objects that it is indeed a Wraith, who feeds on psychics for some reason, and then an image of an African American man named James. Dean tells Jody that Missouri’s thing was sensing from objects, except that her thing was actually telepathy. Psychic blanket BS Powers Syndrome strike again.

Cut to Jack and Sam talking about…uh…stuff. Sam wants to train him to do stuff (Sam doesn’t mention his totally mercenary motive to rescue Mary). First, he has Jack move a pencil. Except Jack can’t seem to do stuff on cue.

Cut to Missouri having an awkward phone conversation with James, who doesn’t believe in her visions. He hangs up on her. She comes out and tells Dean and Jody to go save James (who is her son) and her granddaughter Patience. She’s going to stay behind because she’d just “complicated things.” When Dean protests that this is a bad idea, Missouri reverts to full-on bitch mode and he just says, “Yes, ma’am.” [grrrr] She thanks him, but the damage is done. I am so over this character, who is obviously about to get a cameo kill-off along the lines of Sarah from “Provenance.”

Jody, to her credit, notices the awkwardness.

Back to Jack, who is mentally wrestling with that pencil. Sam tries to coach him through it by asking him how it felt. Jack that stuff just happens, except with Asmodeus, who was “in my head.” Jack gets upset and says he can’t do it with Sam staring at him. Sam says they’ll take a break and he’s off to get some food.

At DTP’s place, Missouri is waiting for the Wraith, who has come back to the scene of the crime for no logical reason given in the story. She tells him she’s seen the future (again, Show, Missouri didn’t previously have precog powers. If she had, she’d have been of much more use in “Home”) and that she dies, no matter what. She’s not going to give him the satisfaction of screaming, but she is certain her “people” will kill him. Well, he’s been pretty stupid so far, so that shouldn’t be too hard.

At a school, Patience is getting lured into playing volleyball by a friend because she has amazing reflexes. Or something. Her friend leaves and the lights fritz. She finds bloody footprints and then her dead grandmother saying her name. She’s attacked from behind and then wakes up from a dream. As she comes out into the office, she talks to her father about her dream. He insists it was just that, but as she leaves, he looks thoughtful.

So, James is actually even more obnoxious than Missouri. Yay.

As he’s buying a freakin’ bar’s worth of beer at a convenience store, Dean sees a TV news story about Missouri’s death. Out at the pumps, he tells Jody and regrets not staying to protect Missouri. Jody asks if they should go back, but Dean says Missouri asked them to go protect her family and that’s what they’ll do.

At James’ home, they get a predictably cold reception from him until they get across to him that yep, his mother is really dead and yep, the cause was supernatural. Jody then rather forcibly insists James pull his head out his ass about the realization that he is indeed the putz who hung up on his mother right before he died. They don’t have time for that.

They really don’t have time for that since here’s Patience at school, experiencing deja vu from her dream. Confused, Patience goes back to her locker, but when she shuts the door, there’s the Wraith. I actually don’t mind Patience, and the actress seems pleasant so far, but boy, does she not look at all young enough to be in high school. That’s a bit distracting.

Anyhoo, the Wraith gets all MRA creepy with Patience, but she has a bit of spunk. She kicks him in the nuts (do Wraiths have nuts?) and the breaks off his stinger/sucker/needle. He tackles her and says it grows back, but gets shot from behind by Dean. He runs as Dean runs after him, blocks the door, and then tries to run Dean down in a Pedo Van after Dean chases him out into the parking lot.

Back inside, Dean and Jody have a talk with Patience. As with her father, they bruskly break through her denial about being a psychic and tell her her estranged grandmother, who allegedly abandoned her and her father after her mother died, is dead.

At the Bunker, Sam is watching Jack through a spy camera and reading up on baby books. Because that’s totally not creepy, or anything. Jack appears to disappear, but he’s just hiding in a corner. He says maybe his powers don’t work because they’re evil and he’s evil, because Dean said so. Jack says his mother said he could be good, but realizes she’s dead because of him and he’s already done evil. And he can’t do a simple “good” thing like push a pencil.

Sam gives him a pep talk that sounds pretty damned insincere, considering all he really wants is for Jack to help him break Mary out of the alt-verse. Though Sam does at least admit that he’s pushing Jack too hard and they should stop for a while. Jack thinks that’s a great plan. Jack asks Sam why Sam is being so “nice” to him and not only does Sam not mention his very mercenary motive, he also does the same damned thing he’s been doing for 13 years and makes it all about himself, his own conflicts, his own issues. He says he’s empathizing with Jack, but that’s never been true before, so….

Back on the Wraith Hunt, Patience is confronting her father. It turns out he lied–a bit–about Missouri cutting them out of her life. Turns out it was the other way round. He talks about always being on the road, Hunting, as a child, except that 13 years ago, Missouri lived in a house, Show. Can’t these writers do a little damned research on show canon before writing these episodes?

Anyhoo, Jody and Dean once again cut to the chase and inform him that Patience is also psychic, which she confirms. The Wraith is now after her. James tells her to go upstairs and pack (because her being alone right now is SUCH A GOOD IDEA). Upstairs, Patience holds a broach and has a memory/vision of Missouri giving it to her at her mother’s gravesite after Daddy gave his mom the boot. Then she starts to pack, opens the closet door, and gets kidnapped by the Wraith. Of course. [facepalm]

Jody makes calls while Dean checks traffic cams for the Pedo Van. Meanwhile, James is going through his mother’s photos and things. He has a bag of something he calls “lithomantic gems.” It turns out James was able to do magic, too, which makes him look like even more of a dick.

Patience wakes up tied to a chair in a room. The Wraith comes in and creeps all over her. He started off on mental patients and accidentally happened across a real psychic. They give him a rush, make him “clear” or whatever. He’s going to take his time eating Patience because her grandmother tasted so darned good. Ugh.

Suddenly, Dean, her father, and Jody come in and the Wraith flees. But then James gets killed, then Jody, and finally Dean. Unsurprisingly, it’s a vision. Also, it’s total bullshit in light of the skills and abilities of the other three. Things start to pan out as before, but Patience is able to warn them so the first two just get knocked out. Her warning to Dean, though, works. After a longish fight, Dean kills the Wraith.

Afterward, Patience finally admits she’s psychic.

Afterward, Jody compliments Dean on the Wraith kill, while Dean compliments Patience (for the second time) on her help. Patience also thanks Dean and Jody. Patience talks about going back to school. Her father wants her to deny her gift (because that’s worked out well so far). Dean backs up James, pointing out that becoming a Hunter is a “horrible” and lonely life, full of pain, with no “joy.” Well, he should know. Jody, on the other hand, suggests that Patience might want to pursue her gift. Jody tried to get Claire to avoid Hunting, too, and it didn’t work out so well. She gives Patience her card. Dean doesn’t look thrilled, but he doesn’t object, either.

Back at the Bunker, Sam says he heard about Missouri and they have it out about Jack. Sam does yet another blame-Dean speech, saying that Dean didn’t think Sam was not worth saving when he was drinking demon blood. Dean soft-pedals around the part where Sam, while high on said blood, beat him half to death–twice–but gets right in Sam’s face about Sam’s hypocrisy in encouraging Jack so Jack can “save” Mary and brings up Jack’s brainwashing Castiel while still in the womb.

Jack is listening to the whole thing. Dean’s words precipitate a vision of Castiel lying on the ground someplace dark and cold. When Jack whispers Castiel’s name, Castiel hears him and wakes up.